


A Savannah Misunderstanding

by fly_sekkiski



Series: In the End it Was Probably De Groot's Fault [4]
Category: Black Sails
Genre: F/M, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-28
Updated: 2016-04-28
Packaged: 2018-06-05 01:11:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6683419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fly_sekkiski/pseuds/fly_sekkiski
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Abigail confides in a Savannah friend about a certain pirate lad named Billy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Savannah Misunderstanding

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so here’s the thing. Savannah – where Lord Ashe sent Abigail before Flint’s trial – wasn’t in existence yet. But in keeping with Black Sails’ spirit of freely mixing established history with established fiction I’m going to work with the idea that the Ashford's house is located in the Savannah of about the 1730s. So that is where Abigail ends up, and most of my Abigail-centred fics will situate her there. (That is, until I figure a way to get her out… or Billy in… either way, it’s all in the works.)

Abigail had quite naturally become good friends with the eldest daughter of one of Savannah’s leading families, Margaret. They were about the same age and, although Margaret was more high-spirited and given to frivolity than Abigail, her adventurous spirit in comparison to some of the other young women in the town, suited Abigail perfectly.

The two young women – or rather Margaret, who was quite a competent artist – had decided to spend their afternoon sketching. Carrying their materials, they strolled out of town and walked some ways looking for an appropriately picturesque spot. They chatted amiably as they walked: Margaret’s most recent infatuation had just come to an abrupt end (she was using the word ‘jilted’ with dramatic flair) and she was bemoaning the general lack of ‘suitably dashing gallants’ on offer in Savannah.

‘Truly,’ she complained, linking her free arm through Abigail’s, ‘the situation in our town is one of such direness that I believe I am beginning to understand why you haven’t given a single young man a second look.’ She gave Abigail a sly glance. ‘Even though there are a number desperately hoping for your favour.’

Abigail simply gave her friend a small smile and said nothing.

‘I dare say that the boys _here_ must seem quite dull in comparison to the young men back in _London_ ,’ Margaret commented with suggestive emphasis. She threw another meaningful glance at Abigail.

‘I think many of the lads in Savannah are very nice young men,’ Abigail replied equably.

Margaret pursed her lips. ‘You are being as stingy as ever,’ she chided. ‘Always the same thing! So-and-so is very nice; such-and-such is very admirable. Phooey! I share all my broken hearts with you, but you never let on if you are interested in anyone!’

‘I am sorry, Meg, it’s not that I don’t wish to share,’ Abigail replied contritely.

But Margaret had stopped walking. She studied the different views of the landscape around them with a practiced eye. ‘I think this would be a good place,’ she said, before she added with a firm nod, ‘yes, this will do very nicely.’

Margaret directed Abigail to set her little folding stool and easel up in one aspect and then sat herself down at a slightly different angle. She organised her materials briskly, pinned a fresh piece of paper to her board and then she resumed her topic.

‘I am determined to have it out of you once and for all, Abigail,’ she declared. ‘Come now, admit it: there is some young man you’ve left behind who has a special place in your heart.’

Abigail studied the view she was supposed to be drawing. She took up her pencil and began to rough in a few clouds but she had put no more than a few lines on her paper before she dropped her hand to her lap. Apart from Miranda, she’d never told anyone her thoughts about Billy. But Margaret had become a very dear and good friend to her. Perhaps, Abigail thought, it would be nice to talk to someone about Billy after all.

‘Well, yes,’ she admitted. ‘There is … was … one young man I think of.’

‘Which is it,’ her friend quizzed. ‘Is or was?’

‘… Is …’ Abigail replied after a brief pause. A rose flush stained her cheeks.

Margaret smiled. Her eyes sparkled happily. ‘And…’ she prompted. ‘Who is he? What is his name? How did you meet him? Was it at a ball in London?’

‘I didn’t meet him in London. Not in England at all, in fact.’ Abigail said slowly. She hesitated, noticing Margaret’s puzzled expression and wondered how she should begin to explain.

‘You mustn’t tell _anyone_ of this, Margaret,’ Abigail said earnestly and with emphasis. She waited until she was sure her friend fully comprehended how serious she was. Not until the other young woman had made a promise not to breathe a word of it to a single soul was Abigail ready to continue.

She took a deep breath. ‘I met him on the pirate ship.’

Margaret dropped her pencil.

‘A pirate!’ Margaret stared at Abigail in blank astonishment. ‘Truly, Abigail? You have fallen in love with a _pirate_?’

‘Well,’ Abigail started slowly, ‘in a manner of speaking, yes. But,’ she hastily added, ‘he was very different from the rest of the pirates.’

Margaret still looked sceptical. Abigail almost wished that she had not broken her silence on Billy, but it was too late now: she had to continue. ‘He was from London, you see. I was told that his parents were good, educated people and taught him his letters. But then he was impressed by the Navy when he was very young.’

Margaret clicked her tongue disapprovingly. Sensing sympathy for her story, Abigail pressed on. ‘After he was taken as a child from his home in London, he spent the next few years of his life a virtual slave of the Navy in miserable conditions–’ Abigail broke off. ‘Truly, Meg, those ships are floating monstrosities and why someone doesn’t do something about it I don’t know.’ She resumed her narrative. ‘But then he was rescued by Captain Flint – yes, _that_ Captain Flint, _and_ the self-same man who rescued me from Nassau – who took him under his wing. He hasn’t seen his parents since.’ Abigail judiciously omitted some aspects of Billy’s personal history, such as killing his former tormentor and not believing he could face his parents again.

Margaret appeared very nearly as moved by the story as Abigail herself had been. Abigail, feeling more confident in the reception of her secret, went on. ‘His name is William but everyone called him Billy – he was a great favourite with the rest of the crew.’

Margaret gave a long sigh of satisfaction. ‘What does he look like?’ she asked, turning her gaze to the easel in front of her.

‘Blue eyes and oh, Meg, _such_ a lovely blue. Dark like the colour of the ocean. And hair the colour of sand. Shortish – the kind you’d like to ruffle with your fingers.’ Abigail clapped one hand over her mouth at the admission.

Margaret, however, wasn’t paying full attention to Abigail’s actions. ‘Young, English, blue eyes, blond hair,’ she summarized briskly. She picked up her pencil. ‘Complexion? Fair?’

‘He had quite a bit of colour in his complexion,’ Abigail replied a little absently. All the details of Billy’s face had risen before her once more.

‘Hmmm.’ Meg pondered. ‘Did he wear a hat?’

‘No, no hat – his head was always bare,’ Abigail told her. ‘Sometimes he would turn his head with just the look and manner of a puppy. It was simply adorable.’

Margaret said nothing, but gave her friend such an arch glance that Abigail began to protest in outrage and tried to poke her with her pencil. Margaret merely swayed out of the way of her attack.

‘What colour was his coat?’ she asked.

Abigail shook her head. ‘No coat.’

‘What?’ Meg exclaimed as if such a thing were barely possible. ‘He didn’t wear a coat?’

‘I don’t think there was one on the ship that would fit him,’ Abigail explained. ‘He was always just in his shirt-sleeves. He had to roll the cuffs up, too, so that they would fit,’ she added.

‘Oh,’ Margaret agreed in delight, ‘that _is_ adorable.’

Abigail stared off into space, drawing paper and pencils forgotten. Billy’s lofty height had been overwhelming the first time she’d found herself standing next to him; the length of his limbs and the sheer power that lay within them took her breath away even now. She wondered how that power would feel under her fingers. When her mother was still alive, she used to ask Abigail to rub the stiffness from her shoulders when she’d been at her beloved embroidery too long. Her mother had been a slender woman and as delicately fine-boned as a bird: Abigail’s fingers had worked through her soft flesh easily. Billy, Abigail fancied, would be a much tougher business. She glanced at her hands. Would they even reach across the expanse of his shoulders? Would her fingers have the strength to knead what she suspected was rather a lot of hard, dense muscle. Abigail amused herself for a moment imagining what the reaction of the Ashford household would be if she suddenly offered to help Sarah in the kitchen with the bread-making.

‘How about his figure?’ Margaret asked, interrupting Abigail’s thoughts. ‘Was he taller than you? Plump, Thin?’

‘Oh,’ Abigail sighed, stirring herself. ‘Taller than me, definitely. But he was ever so slender – I quite think his waist was narrower than many women’s: he seemed to need to hold his pants up with a kind of make-shift belt. Leather, perhaps … or maybe fabric. I can’t recall now.’

Abigail frowned, cross with herself for having forgotten even a small detail about Billy. Margaret, on the other hand, was exceedingly happy. Her pencil moved swiftly over her paper and she hummed cheerfully under her breath as she sketched. Abigail drifted off again, staring at the landscape but daydreaming about the ocean. Meg moved from her sketching pencil to her pastels, drawing with absorption and a rapidity born of confidence.

A long time passed before Abigail roused herself from her thoughts. She looked down in disgust at her sketching paper on which she’d made very few marks.

‘Oh dear,’ she sighed. ‘I’ve completely wasted my time. All I have done are a few clouds and they don’t look right at all. I’m sure you’ve been busy all this while – let me see what you’ve drawn, Meg.’

‘Just a few more moments and then I’ll be done.’

Margaret was still working, one eye closed for perspective and her tongue captured between her teeth in concentration. After a couple of minutes, during which Abigail attempted to fix her clouds, Margaret passed her drawing to her friend to see.

The picture showed a slim young lad standing barefoot on a rock and staring out at a sea tufted with whitecaps. The boy appeared to lean into a stiff wind that tossed his blond curls and tugged at a patterned scarf that was tied around his waist to hold his short pants above his narrow hips. The freshness of the sea air, presumably, had brought rosy colour to cheeks and lips in an otherwise very fair complexion. One hand was raised to shade his brilliant blue eyes from the sun overhead; the rolled cuff of his sleeve sliding down towards his shoulder to reveal a slender arm. He appeared little more than fifteen or sixteen years of age.

Abigail exclaimed with delight as soon as she saw it. ‘Oh, Meg!’ she sighed in appreciation. ‘You draw ever so brilliantly. The water is wonderful and somehow – I don’t quite see how – you’ve managed to make it look as though it’s windy. And the boy is truly full of life. He quite looks as though he is about to leap from his rock. I so wish I had your talent.’ Abigail continued to study her friend’s drawing. ‘How ever did you think of this?’ she asked after a moment.

‘Why,’ Margaret smiled, ‘It’s your Billy, of course, Abigail. I drew it as you described him!’

Abigail stared at her friend for a second. She looked back down at the drawing Margaret had produced and started to laugh.

‘ _My_ Billy!’ Abigail finally managed once her laughter subsided. ‘Meg, I don’t quite know how I went so wrong describing him to you, but Billy looks nothing like this.’

Margaret took back her drawing. ‘I suppose,’ she said with a fond glance at her handiwork, ‘that my idea of a pirate ship’s cabin boy and the real thing are very different.’

Abigail started. ‘Whatever gave you the idea that Billy was the cabin boy?’

Margaret directed a stern look at Abigail and began to count on her fingers.

‘One, you said he was young; two, that he was the crew’s favourite; three, that he was an adorable puppy; four, that there weren’t any coats small enough to fit him; and five, you told me the crew all called him Billy, which is a name for a _boy_ , Abigail.’

‘Did I say that? Perhaps I did,’ Abigail admitted thoughtfully. ‘But I would never have said Billy was too _small_ to wear a coat.’

Margaret’s brows started to knit but Abigail continued blithely. ‘Regardless, Billy wasn’t the cabin boy, Meg, he was the quartermaster.’

Margaret was beginning to look suspicious. ‘The quartermaster,’ she repeated. ‘Abigail, a quartermaster is a _man’s_ position. How old was Billy exactly?’

‘Exactly, I don’t know,’ Abigail replied. ‘But more than twenty I’m sure.’ Margaret’s eyes began to narrow and Abigail scrambled to finish clarifying before her friend skewered her on the points of her gaze. ‘And when I said that he was a favourite with the crew, I meant than they liked and respected him, not that he was a _pet_. I don’t know why they still called him Billy – I suppose it to be habit?’

Margaret began to tap a staccato rhythm on her easel with her pencil. ‘Slender, but jackets might not fit, was it?’ Her voice was accusatory, her eyes two gimlets screwing into Abigail. ‘You said, Abigail, did you not, that Billy is taller than you? Was he also taller than Mr Ashford?’

Abigail nodded. The tapping of the pencil accelerated menacingly.

‘Then was he taller than my father, who is, I remind you, near six feet?’

Abigail nodded again. She glanced nervously at Margaret's pencil, which was now thundering against the wooden frame of the easel.

Margaret pursed her lips. ‘By how much, Abigail, was Billy taller than my father?’

Abigail whispered that she thought maybe half a foot.

Margaret whipped her pencil round to point threateningly at Abigail. ‘Abigail Ashe, if you are truly my dearest friend, you are going to confess everything to me properly.’ Abigail opened her mouth to protest, but Margaret cut her short before she even had a chance to begin. ‘Oh no! Don’t you dare pretend you weren’t withholding details from me!’

Abigail cowered on her stool.

‘Now then,’ Margaret told her sternly. ‘Please explain – _precisely_ , if you don’t mind – why it was you assumed there wasn’t a coat that would fit Billy.’

Abigail threw a slightly despairing look at her friend. Still, and although she blushed deeply all the while, Abigail did as she was told. She explained about the way Billy rolled up his sleeves and what that rolling exposed. She explained, as her cheeks turned rose pink, about arms near the size of other men’s thighs. She recounted, as rose deepened to peony, muscular forearms ringed in leather and strength to lift hundredweights of sacks with ease or – and here the pink in Abigail’s cheeks turned poppy red – Abigail herself as though she were nothing more than a wisp of straw. She described shoulders so wide that they could carry, she imagined, herself seated upon one like a child and a back so broad it shaded her from the scorching rays of the afternoon sun (relief, Abigail felt, her flaming face could well use this very instant). She revealed, as the crimson flush crept around to her nape, hard planes of an expansive chest glimpsed through the deep vee of an open-necked shirt. For good measure, and to prevent Margaret from accusing her of withholding anything more, Abigail added that Billy carried not only a knife, but a sword and sometimes pistols too in the wide belt - leather, not fabric, she now remembered - that wrapped tightly around his narrow hips. With one final blush, she filled in details of the angular features of his face that rough stubble did little to hide and added that underneath the sand-blond of his hair Billy’s skin was a deep gold. Her explanation completed, Abigail pressed the backs of her hands to her poor, overheated cheeks.

Margaret, her mouth slightly ajar, stared back at her with astounded eyes.

‘Good gracious, Abigail,’ she gasped. ‘You aren’t describing a man, you’re describing a colossus.’

‘Well, yes, perhaps,’ Abigail conceded. ‘But Meg,’ she added seriously, ‘he was _lovely_.’

Recovering some of her natural liveliness, Margaret started to laugh. ‘Abigail, you’re not allowed to use the words ‘puppy’, ‘adorable’, and ‘lovely’ to describe someone who is of six-and-a-half feet in height, possessed of limbs like tree-trunks and the strength of ten men; who sleeps armed to the teeth, doesn’t shave every day, and wears no _coat_!’ She shook her head indulgently. ‘I wish I could see the world as you do, Abigail: when you talk about this man you don’t even seem to remember that he is a _pirate_. But then, that open-mindedness is one of the many things that I do love about you.’

Abigail was merely relieved that, at least for the moment, she didn't have to describe anything more about Billy. 

‘So.’ Margaret leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially. ‘Did he kiss you?’

‘Of course not! Margaret! He would never have been so forward,’ Abigail protested.

‘Oh don’t be so silly. Abigail. You’re hardly a little girl and you’ve finally made it clear that Billy was hardly a little boy. Furthermore,’ Margaret added, with an appraising glance at her friend, ‘it simply isn’t possible that Billy wouldn’t have found you the loveliest creature he’d ever seen. Besides, he’s a pirate. I don’t think they stand upon manners.’

‘I’m not being silly,’ Abigail rejoined seriously. ‘It would simply have been out of the question. For many reasons.’

‘Such a pity!’ Margaret said lightly, before noticing that her friend’s previously rosy face had turned very pale. ‘But Abigail, dearest, didn’t you _want_ him to?’

Abigail sat for a very long time, staring silently at nothing at all, unable to find the words to describe her answer.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Reunion in Savannah](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7624957) by [MarieTurtle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarieTurtle/pseuds/MarieTurtle)




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